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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29915328">This is the Hour of Lead</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenrousei_kuroi/pseuds/tenrousei_kuroi'>tenrousei_kuroi</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Love Potion/Spell, M/M, Obsessive Behavior, POV Second Person, Rape/Non-con Elements, Remus Lupin is even worse, Seer Regulus Black, Sirius Black is rather cruel, Stalking, Suicidal Thoughts</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-03-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-03-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-15 20:21:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Rape/Non-Con, Underage</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,142</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29915328</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/tenrousei_kuroi/pseuds/tenrousei_kuroi</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: Regulus can't help the random shivers down his spine by the feeling of being constantly watched. (Intended for a dark fic - the Invisibility cloak here is used as an instrument for stalkerism. The stalker may or may not act beyond merely following Regulus).</p><p>Title credit to Emily Dickinson.</p><p>This is the Hour of Lead –<br/>Remembered, if outlived,<br/>As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –<br/>First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Regulus Black &amp; Sirius Black, Regulus Black/Remus Lupin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>6</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>37</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Regulus Black Fest 2021</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>This is the Hour of Lead</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Warnings for stalking, obsession, sexual assault, emotional manipulation and suicidal ideation—almost all of which involves a minor. Also, it is in the second person, which could make those things worse for some people. Please tread carefully.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>You were only thirteen when it started.</p><p>The rocky corridor connecting the east dungeons to the entrance hall had never frightened you before, lonely and desolate as it was. People didn’t walk this way, only you did. The northern corridor was faster, roomier, better lit. On its smooth stone walls there were torches, paintings and bulletin boards littered with academic events. In the eastern hallway, the path was narrow, uneven and the unkempt walls were starting to degrade. The stonework was sharp and jutted out in places. The few portraits still hanging here were barren, their occupants long having since fled.</p><p>No one ever lit the lamps. You had to go by wandlight. It was a long, dreary trek every day from your dormitory to classes and then back again in the evenings. And yet, for nearly three years you never minded.</p><p>You walked this way because it was soothing to you to be out of the chatter. You were always seeking isolation.</p><p>
  <em>Just stick to yourself, and others will let you be…</em>
</p><p>Your mother had said that to you once. With her hair falling lazily from sapphire pins and her empty eyes staring well past your face and across the parlor, she had spoken those words. It had been a dismissal. Whatever problem you’d come to her with wasn’t worth her consideration. She was telling you to ignore whatever Sirius or your father (it had been Sirius) had done.</p><p>But you had taken it to heart.</p><p>And so you kept to yourself.</p><p>You sat by yourself at meals, worked busily in the very back of the classrooms, and walked where no one would bump into you. <em>Ghosting,</em> Sirius had called it during one of your rare at-school conversations. <em>You’re always ghosting around, Regulus; you might as well be dead.</em></p><p>Yet people found you anyway. You flew on the pitch by yourself and only on Hogsmeade weekends, when the chances of anyone catching you were next to nothing, but she still saw you. Miranda, the Ravenclaw team captain had seen you flitting about in the air, juggling three snitches across the pitch and back. She’d been good friends with Slytherin’s own captain, and a week later you were placed on the team against your will.</p><p>As much as you hated the attention, part of you felt an impish joy in beating your brother’s friend James Potter to the snitch every time—and you were only thirteen. It was amusing to watch him stomp off the field, to glance across the Great Hall and see him scowling over eggs the next morning. You didn’t hate James Potter, the only friend of Sirius's you'd ever actually met, but seeing him so upset brought you a rare smile and even some joy.</p><p>And you paid for it.</p><p>
  <em>Just stick to yourself and others will let you be...if you’d stay out of the way, you wouldn’t get hurt…</em>
</p><p>You knew you shouldn’t have gone for it—shouldn’t have played. Shouldn’t have dared to walk into the limelight. Because later (much later, far too late for it to have mattered) you realized that it was at one of the Quidditch matches that <em>he</em> first saw you. And it was over James Potter’s furious breakfast rants that he was reminded weekly of your existence.</p><p>You’d been seen, and now there was nowhere to hide.</p><p>The first time you noticed something awry, it was late. You were tired and you told yourself you were imaging things. But as you walked that creaky, damp, lightless corridor back to your dorm, you swore you heard hindered footsteps. Footsteps that stopped when you did, but were not your own.</p><p>“Hello?” The light from your wand could only reach so far, but it should have been far enough. They sounded so <em>close</em>. Yet...there was no one there.</p><p>Sweating, shaking, <em>imagining,</em> you walked faster until you got to the dormitory entrance.</p><p>“Basilisk,” you muttered as quietly as possible. Who knew who might be listening?</p>
<hr/><p>You never went on Hogsmeade trips. Previously, you had used those days to fly, but now that the cat had escaped that bag, you were using the time in a mostly empty castle to enjoy visiting the library during more normal hours. These were weekends where you didn’t have to show up at the break of dawn just to be alone.</p><p>This was your Third Year, but your first year in Divination, and so you buried yourself in works of premonition. You had a natural talent for it, the professor had said so. A cross-balance to your abysmal transfiguration skills. Just as your moment of Quidditch hubris had brought you equal moments of fear.</p><p>
  <em>Everything must balance. </em>
</p><p>After only a few short months, you found yourself beyond the need of crystal balls or tea leaves and the teacher suggested you read books which became increasingly more arcane. By the beginning of Christmas break, you were able to slip into it—the place where you could see.</p><p>All the texts referred to it as a trance, but you always felt more like you were sliding into a fugue. Away from your body, your mind, your very <em>self</em>, yet not into nothingness...but into a new existence, instead. Each time, your eyes would fade over a nacreous white and you would go limp in your seat. It lasted minutes, hours...on Christmas Eve you spent the whole day on your bed, alone, but <em>surrounded</em> by sight.</p><p>You’d not yet latched onto anything concrete, at least, not until that day. Merely you’d seen snippets of hazy past events and unclear, muddled ideas of possible futures. You rarely had control over where or <em>when </em>you ended up during these episodes.</p><p>Unsure of the time and willing to sacrifice the Christmas Eve feast for the progress you were making, you sat next to yourself on the bed and blinked, looking…what a sight you always were during these episodes. Sweaty skin, twitching muscles, your hair a hanging curtain of black, shadowing over your face. Everything sunken in shadow except your eyes, those creamy white eyes.</p><p>You turned your head and there he was, standing right next to the bed, staring at you with the eyes and teeth of a wolf.</p><p>Dark blonde hair, cobalt-blue eyes and a crooked, enticing grin…</p><p>You jerked painfully back, reconnecting again with yourself so suddenly, so <em>hurtfully</em>, that you actually felt tears pour from your eyes. You were sweating, shaking…</p><p>You blinked. Your sight cleared and the world lost its haze. You stared at the edge of the bed. No one was standing there. You were completely alone, as you had been all day.</p><p>But you didn’t feel alone. You were scared to walk near where you’d seen him. With a shaking hand, you tried to wipe away the tears from your burning eyes and your fingers came away red.</p>
<hr/><p>In your Fourth Year was when it got worse.</p><p>The hallway was too much for you now. The sounds were always there. The <em>tap tap tap</em> of deliberately sleuthful walking, and the <em>swish </em>of robes that were not your own. You started to walk with your classmates, like a prey animal desperate for protection.</p><p>Your roommates noticed you spending more time in the commons rather than holed up in your room. You’d known them for years but never really connected. Your own cousin, Rabastan Lestrange, had slept in the bed next to you for over three years and yet as the two of you sat by the Slytherin fires together for the first time that fall, he had to ask you how your name was pronounced.</p><p>Sirius noticed your changed behavior, as well.</p><p>“Been seeing you around a lot more lately, Reggie,” he said neutrally, sitting down next to you at breakfast that morning. “You’re normally finishing up when we’re just sitting down.”</p><p>You nodded.</p><p>“You know, Reggie,” Sirius suddenly said very seriously. He leaned against you and whispered so that through the din of the dining hall, no one else would hear. “If you ever get scared, the password into our dorms is manticore.”</p><p>It sounded so honest, so sincere. And you’d accepted the peace offering for what you believed it to be. Sirius had left home the previous summer, had stormed out with a grandiose display of myopia and pettiness, as was his modus operandi.</p><p>But he’d not meant to hurt you. You could see that now. There’d been bitterness the last few years, brought about mostly by Sirius’s flagrant disregard for familial rules and your own general quiet demeanor. You wanted to chide Sirius for treating you like a child, but you appreciated the gesture too much to. Instead you smiled—beamed, even.</p><p>And on it went. Every couple of weeks, Sirius would send you the Gryffindor password—just in case.</p>
<hr/><p>Just before winter break was when your things began disappearing. It had been almost imperceptible at first—a quill here, a T-shirt there. In the beginning, you thought you were just being forgetful. You’d been spending more time Seeing lately...perhaps it was addling your memory?</p><p>Until one morning you woke up to find a lock of your hair missing. Maybe another person wouldn’t have noticed—your roommates all told you you were imagining things when you tried to show them—but you could tell. A spot of your fringe was shorter than it should have been.</p><p>Seeing was getting trickier, as well. Ever since you’d seen <em>him</em> in your room, your inner eye had become obsessed. You could no longer dive into the future or the past, your Vision was stuck firmly in the present, and it seemed intent on following <em>him</em>.</p><p>You hadn’t seen his face since. Rather, you seemed to see <em>through</em> him. Saw what he saw. Walked with him. Over your already vision-blurry Sight, there seemed to be a further veil. Something constantly dangling smoothly in front of your eyes.</p><p>When you Saw him, he was always alone, and usually uncomfortably near. You only Saw at odd hours because it left you in such a vulnerable position and you couldn’t risk anyone walking in on you. Perhaps you should have done so anyway. Should have let the fugue take you during a busy lunch or a class period, then you might have seen who he was—who he <em>knew. </em></p><p>It could have saved you.</p><p>Instead, you tried to convince yourself he wasn’t real. You tore through book after book, latching onto every non-literal divination interpretation you could find. He represented something, he was an omen, he was you...he was <em>anything</em> but real.</p><p>That Christmas was the first time you wrote home asking to return for the holidays. Your father refused, and so you stayed at Hogwarts—alone in your dorm.</p><p>Sleeping alone had always been a comfort to you. While you’d enjoyed your brother’s affections during the early years of your life when he’d still had them for you, you’d always been a bit put out when he’d crawl into your bed to snuggle you. Because it disrupted your thoughts.</p><p>You would normally talk at night, not to yourself, but to no one. Merely testing out words and examining ideas verbally. Sometimes you would practice wandless magic—see if you could paint lights across the ceiling or over the bedspread.</p><p>But tonight you were too scared. There was a crippling self-conscious feeling following you everywhere lately. Whenever you found yourself alone, instead of being comforted you were suspicious. Because for all your Divination research, part of you was uncertain if you were really alone or not.</p><p>You almost made it through the holidays. Every night you’d lay awake, unsleeping, staring straight ahead with the lamp on. You’d doze in public places periodically throughout the day to make up for it, but eventually the lack of meaningful sleep caught up with you, and on the last night of break, you passed out just after midnight.</p><p>Your dreams were restless. Everything was dark. You tried so hard to walk and to run, but you never seemed to get anywhere. Something was always scratching at you from the front—the sides—everywhere. It were as though you ran through a dark forest, full of cold branches that curled ruthlessly around you as you moved.</p><p>You didn’t immediately realize you’d awoken. Everything was still dark but you could feel your bedroom. You could feel the sweaty sheets pooled at your feet. Dangling one arm off the bed, you could feel the heat from the lamp—</p><p>The lamp that you couldn’t see.</p><p>In a panic, you sat up, breathing painfully. Why couldn’t you see?</p><p>Something was wrong, you could feel something. Not really weight, but the threat of it. Something was hovering just millimeters from you.</p><p>A rush of air, movement. Something was whispered very softly—a spell. Sweating and panting, your vision began to slowly return. After a minute, you could once again see your dorm, your lamp, your illuminated clock reading 4:30 a.m…</p><p>You felt an enormous chill and looked down. Your nightshirt had come unbuttoned and was splayed out, exposing your chest and your pants were down around your knees. There were deep, precise aches along the skin of your thighs, pulsating brutally. Sharp and even...finger marks. Shaking, you reached down to feel raised, reddened scratches on your abdomen, chafed patches of tender skin along your cock…</p><p>You’d screamed then. A pitiful, gut-wrenched sound that tore from your throat. Falling back down against your pillows, you convulsed once, twice...three times before slipping back into your Sight, this time unwillingly.</p><p>He was still in the room. You could see yourself twice over, once through your own disconnected eyes and again through his, like the turning image of a kaleidoscope. Through a slight blur, you could see yourself writhing on the bed, mere feet away. You looked at him with your own eyes—a smirk, that predatory look in his gaze—and through his gaze you could simultaneously see yourself—pathetic, trapped, exposed.</p><p>You lost consciousness while you were within your Sight, something all your readings had warned you never to do, and it wreaked havoc on your dreams. Later that morning you awoke a tangled mess on the floor, the aches and fears of horribly vivid nightmares still clinging to you.</p>
<hr/><p>No longer could you pretend that what you saw was within your own head. For weeks you walked the school grounds with the painful reminders of the specter’s visit coiled all around your abdomen and legs. It seemed that with every beat of your heart the bruises pulsated. The scratches burned as your trousers rubbed over them with each step.</p><p>It quickly became too much for you to handle. Unwelcome and obsessive thoughts began to creep into your mind. For weeks your condition deteriorated. Food wouldn’t settle in your stomach, and calm sleep never came, even though the return of your dormmates gave you some sense of safety.</p><p>Then, in late April, with Beltane fast approaching you were finally summoned home for a brief stay. Even Sirius had agreed to accompany you to the festival on your aunt and uncle’s property.</p><p>“Are you sure this’s a good idea, Sirius?” you asked him as you walked together to the edge of campus, preparing to meet your parents. “I don’t want you to just fight.”</p><p>“Nonsense,” Sirius said airily. “I’ll just be at the party; it’s not like I’m coming back home.”</p><p>He stopped walking once your mother and father were in sight, waiting for you at the front gates of the school, ready to apparate you home. Sirius gave you a warm hug and a deep kiss on your temple, seeming to relish the scowls he received from your parents. “Be good, I’ll see you this weekend,” he said, sending you off safely before returning to the school.</p><p>There was a calmness about going home. You endured your mother’s reprimands and the vice-like grip from your father as he tugged you along. They were miffed that you were on friendly-enough terms with your brother, and normally, this would have cowed you, but you were just too relieved.</p><p>You were going home. To Grimmauld Place.</p><p><em>He</em> had only ever appeared at school. Away from Hogwarts, you had to be safe.</p><p>Sitting at home again in your own bedroom, you began to feel better, and the troubling thoughts ceased. Dinner that first night home—some simple soup whipped up by your house elf at the last minute after your parents cancelled dinner plans—was the best food you’d ever tasted. You had three helpings and went to bed happy. Safe. Content.</p><p>That Saturday, true to his word, Sirius was waiting for you at Uncle Ignatius and Aunt Lucretia’s home. While your parents eyed him with distaste, there was enough of a crowd that he was easily pushed from their attention. You wondered if Aunt Lucretia had welcomed Sirius just to spite your mother. </p><p>You had a good night of snacking and drinking. Sirius in particular seemed eager to ply increasingly harder drinks into your system. By the time you were to jump the fire, you were already swaying on your feet.</p><p>“Easy, Reggie,” one of your cousins chuckled. “Don’t burn yourself.”</p><p>Aunt Lucretia had set out your favorite floating lanterns all along the back yard and Uncle Cygnus had brought a selection of music that was old and traditional, but still pleasant. You stepped out of the fires’ glow for just a few minutes around ten p.m. or so, gently nursing another drink with a giddy grin on your face as you watched Sirius smear ash all over your cousin Andromeda.</p><p>Odd that he’d insisted on coming this year when last year he’d avoided this—and all family gatherings—like the plague, eager to distance himself from the House of Black.</p><p>You smiled and thought to yourself that maybe he had come for you. As miserable as you’d been, Sirius had clearly noticed.</p><p>You took deep, smoky breathes, loving the crisp night air. Already you were wondering if things would be okay after all. The terrors were all at school. Nothing had pursued you here. Mother had always wanted you to be home schooled, perhaps you could ask her to revisit the idea…</p><p>The world seemed to slow down as a lantern drifted casually towards you. You reached out in slow motion to touch it, feeling the paper cave ever so slightly as the lantern wobbled in the air. Then it went dark, sinking to the ground like a wounded ship to the bottom of the sea—</p><p>—And you could feel it.</p><p>A shiver went up your spine as that subtle pressure returned, the feeling of something being so close that if you so much as breathed too deeply, you would touch it.</p><p>A lump rose in your throat. Quickly, you strode forward, just barely back into the light of the fire. Everyone around you was still having a great time. Even your parents were smiling…</p><p>Terrified, you turned around. You didn’t want to look, but you had to know.</p><p>As usual, there was nothing visible behind you, but you couldn’t slip into your Sight here, you just <em>couldn’t. </em>And so you stared at the darkness, instead, stared deep into the low-hanging willow branches and waving brush that lined the edge of the property.</p><p>Then you saw it—a glittering motion, like water against the dark foliage. Translucent arms were raising, until they grasped and pulled back a deep hood ever so slightly, just enough that you could see a face.</p><p>Even in the dark you knew that face. It was <em>him, </em>and although it was just his eyes gleaming out of the dark at you, the rest of him shrouded in invisibility, you knew what you were looking at.</p><p>Your eyes rolled back in your head and you crumpled to the ground. The last thing you remember was your brother catching you with ease, as if he’d been waiting for you to fall.</p>
<hr/><p>Your parents blamed Beltane on your alcohol consumption, and you let them. What were you to tell them instead? That you were haunted? Cursed? Stalked by something real but intangible? Even in your own mind you were unsure if what you saw was human or demon.</p><p>And so you were shuffled back to school, where the fear and the pain and the uncomfortable thoughts returned.</p><p>You felt trapped. You couldn’t run from this. It had been nearly two years and he was always still there. There was no fight in your veins, there never had been. The idea of defending yourself, of <em>attacking</em>, never crossed your mind.</p><p>You failed all your exams that May, even Divination. You simply couldn’t concentrate. Professor Slughorn tried to check you into the Hospital Wing but you refused almost violently. The hospital—no, it was empty, you’d be the only student there and you couldn’t, absolutely <em>couldn’t</em>, sleep alone. Not with <em>him </em>lurking around every corner. He’d not marked you up in your sleep since that Christmas night, but only because you’d not been alone at school since. Those two nights alone at your parents’? Luck, sheer luck. Or had he been there, too? Your skin crawled constantly now. Had he touched you those nights? Gentler and unnoticed?</p><p>Desperate, with only hours before the Hogwarts Express would depart, bringing you to summer vacation and your brother to adult life, you sought out Sirius. You were at your breaking point and this was your last chance to see him before he graduated for good and left to god knows where.</p><p>You sprinted and at the entrance to Gryffindor Tower you began to babble, “Manticore, fortis, firecrab, Godric, aconitum lococtonum!” Desperate, you rattled off every password your brother had ever mentioned to you and eventually, the portrait swung open. Suddenly uneasy, you crawled inside, wary of your green Slytherin robes.</p><p>No one seemed to notice you much. It was early enough in the morning and students were mostly staggering around, half asleep and scouring the common room for forgotten items to pack. When you didn’t spot your big brother in the sparse crowd, you moved instead to the stairs and began to climb, reading room plaques as you went.</p><p>In the seventh year dorms you found him. Sirius was sitting on his bed, poring over a parchment of some sort. His trunk was packed at his feet. He smiled when you arrived.</p><p>“Reggie,” he said, waving you over. “Come here; you look awful!”</p><p>You dashed to him, nearly knocking James Potter over as you did so. And suddenly it all came pouring out. Every sordid detail. You told him of your visions, of the stalker you couldn’t shake. You sobbed into his shoulder as you recounted your own shattered mind and your failing coursework.</p><p>“I’ll have to repeat the whole year, and Mother and Father will disown me!”</p><p>Sirius shushed you, rocking you back and forth gently. “No, of course not, Reggie. They’d never do that.”</p><p>“They disowned <em>you.</em>”</p><p>“I ran away, silly,” Sirius reminded you. You felt him card a gentle hand through your hair, petting you, almost like a frightened animal. “Besides, you needn’t worry about your schoolwork any longer.”</p><p>You could hear James Potter rustling about across the room. You almost had the presence of mind to be embarrassed. Sirius’s other two friends, whom you had never closely seen and who were only vague images in your head, were nowhere to be seen, but you could hear the shower running.</p><p>In a quiet voice, this time mindful that James Potter was still only meters away, you admitted to Sirius how destructive your thoughts had become. At this, Sirius’s voice became stern, and his grip on your hair tightened. In no uncertain terms, he made it clear that you were not to harm yourself.</p><p>“You’re leaving, Sirius,” you scoffed. How could he watch you when he was no longer at school? Then, in a gentler voice, you whispered, “I think I just wanted to see you one more time.”</p><p>Oh, how Sirius’s eyes had danced, then. A coy sparkle holding back some great excitement, like a child with a secret he’d been dying to tell. “I’ll be seeing you all the time,” Sirius said simply. You blinked at him. “Because you’re leaving, too.”</p><p>“I—what?” The words confused you. Frightened you, even. It seemed that Sirius always spoke to you with an air of condescending detachment, as though he were constantly privy to your future in ways even your Sight could not discern.</p><p>“Prongs, get Moony’s potion, will you?”</p><p>James Potter passed something over your head and into Sirius’s grip. A small vial. Emerald green and sparkling slightly. Sirius told you it was a calming draught and, trusting as always, you took his word and drank deeply. There was a wintery taste to the potion, much like the shampoo you’d been so fond of last year, as well as a woody aftertaste you didn’t recognize. The potion sparkled all the way down your throat.</p><p>Then Sirius continued talking as you blinked slowly at him, confused and perturbed. An admission seemed to be forming with his words. You followed along at first, hearing concern from your brother. Worries about your parents, your cousins, and the general path of your life. It wasn’t news to you. Sirius had always despised you the least of all your family, and it was sweet of him to want to protect you.</p><p>Except—</p><p>“Sirius,” you insisted. “I can’t run away from home and from school.”</p><p>But your words were wispy, the ghost of an assertion, for behind your brother the door of the washroom opened and in small flush of steam <em>he </em>stepped out into the common dorm and your heart stopped.</p><p>It was him, the one who had crept into your Sight, who had, invisible, stalked your movements through school and back home. For while your Vision had always been blurred, being this close there was no mistaking him.</p><p>For a moment, you thought you would vomit, and you actually tried to stand up, but Sirius had a grip on your wrist and the other boy’s bright blue eyes were searing into you. He spoke lazily to your brother for a moment, and you couldn’t hear his words through the pounding in your ears, but the mere sound of his voice was triggering something within you and you felt compelled—ordered to be closer.</p><p>You leaned forward and reached out a tentative hand to him, wanting to touch the smooth, blonde hair. The closer you leaned, the more you could smell a woodsy cedar, like a forest, just how the elixir had tasted.</p><p>And a small part of your mind cursed you for never looking closer, for never seeing your brother’s friend for who he was, but how were you to have noticed, when you glimpsed him only ever from a distance, his face buried in a book?</p><p>Sirius called the boy Remus Lupin, and at the words, you felt something deep within you jerk, then settle.</p><p>At some point a fourth boy had entered the room, and he laughed at your predicament, cruelly. He delighted in explaining all of the sordid details. His squeaking staccato you could hear quite clearly as it pierced through your hazy mind. To him it seemed one big joke that his friend—<em>Remus Lupin, </em>why was the name so pleasant to you now?—had cultivated such an obsession over you. He chuckled harshly too at the idea of how quickly your brother, the one person who should have protected you, had agreed to facilitate your capture.</p><p>To <em>give</em> you away. As if you'd been his all along. As though any existence were a step up from your current life.</p><p>Maybe your life wasn't much, but it had been <em>yours.</em></p><p>You felt angry tears pool in your eyes and you could have kicked yourself for being so stupid as to walk right into Sirius’s waiting arms, when <em>this </em>was his intention all along.</p><p>Sirius seemed to be able to read your mind.</p><p>“Don’t fret, Reggie,” he said. “We were coming to collect you before the train left, anyway.”</p><p>Was this how it was all to finish? You wanted to run, but your very soul seemed to scream at the idea. How could you ever bear to be far away from the blonde boy with the wolfish grin? Oh, you could almost pant at how much you wanted him. Your whole body was tingling, and your cock twitched as he moved closer to you. You wanted to kneel down in front of him, bury yourself in his grasp...and the feelings were only getting stronger. </p><p>“Well lads, if you’re finished packing, we can make our way now.” James Potter snapped you out of your thoughts. You looked at him with wide eyes. “Peter and I can make a trip through the dungeons to get his things—” he jerked his head towards you, “and the three of us can take the train back to London. I’m sure Remus is eager to apparate his little Seer straight home.”</p><p>“Cheers, Moony,” said Peter in his unbearably squeaky voice. He picked up the handle of his trunk and Remus Lupin’s, as well. “We’ll stop by your new place tonight with all your stuff.”</p><p>Remus was fastening his robes, brushing his soft, damp hair free from his eyes and nodding. He hadn't said a word to you, but he stared at you with such a covetous desire and so sly a smile that you felt you could read his very thoughts. Thoughts that half an hour ago would have made your skin crawl. But now...?</p><p>"Mother, Father, they'll..." you started to ramble. You would be noticed missing, wouldn't you? But Sirius and his friends were not even slightly concerned, and your stomach twisted as you imagined what could possibly inspire such confidence. Sirius gave you a coy wink.</p><p>And like a prisoner set for cell transfer, you were hoisted to your feet and marched to the door.</p><p>You still struggled, despite the potion. Although, with Remus Lupin now so interminably close—warm hands cupping the base of your neck, nose in your hair—you were losing your fight, and starting to forget why you’d ever had it. Still, you tried to pull away again.</p><p>“Easy, Reggie,” Sirius chided, and together, he and Remus draped the thick silvery cloak over your shoulders. It was heavy and light at the same time, and you saw your body vanish before you. A pair of hands—Remus? Sirius? What did it matter? But <em>oh,</em> the potion bubbled in your stomach and you hoped it was Remus—pulled the hood of the cloak over your head.</p><p>“There you go,” Sirius whispered. “Invisible for real this time.”</p><p>And so you were gone.</p><p> </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I actually adore Remus/Regulus as a normal, non-creepy pairing but obviously that didn't happen here.</p><p>You can chat with me on tumblr if you fancy: http://tenrousei-kuroi.tumblr.com/</p></blockquote></div></div>
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